Silicon-Based Yagi-Uda Antenna Reflector

A silicon-based “plasma antenna” has attracted substantial attentions due to the semiconductor’s natural ability to reconfigure itself from a metal state to an insulator state, and vice versa. The silicon enables the plasma antenna to operate as a highly practicable and low-cost reconfigurable antenna because the external electromagnetic field is coupled with an electron-crowded plasma channel. Given these characteristics, it was found that the silicon-based plasma channel is capable of becoming a reconfigurable reflector which redirects electromagnetic energy by reflecting an incoming signal back toward its original direction. In this work, the performance of a silicon-based reflector mounted on a Yagi-Uda antenna is presented. A numerical simulation is carried out to demonstrate the feasibility of the antenna as a plasma channel, prior to its fabrication. The I-V characteristics of the fabricated device are consequently shown, and finally the maximum gain along with its beam pattern is demonstrated.